Story
There is one story
and one story only
That will prove
worth your telling….
— Robert Graves,
“To Juan at the Winter Solstice”
“To many, mathematicians have come to resemble an esoteric sect, whose members alone have access to secret otherworldly mysteries.
All of us who came to Mykonos believed that this is an unfortunate situation. Mathematics is an inseparable part of human culture, and should be viewed and treated as such. Our underlying assumption was that mathematical reasoning had something important in common with that quintessential human activity – story-telling. But what this means, and what kind of connections can be drawn between the two, remained to be sorted out.”
last summer’s Mykonos meeting
Flashback to
Harrison Ford’s birthday
a year earlier:
“He’s a Mad Scientist and
I’m his Beautiful Daughter.”
— Deety in Heinlein’s
The Number of the Beast.
“If you have ever loved a book
so much that you began to
believe that it continued on
in its own world
even after you put it down,
this book could be for you.”
— Jodi Russell, review of
Number of the Beast
These last two quotations
are from
Story Theory and
the Number of the Beast,
by Steven H. Cullinane on
December 21, 2001.
Related material:
See Lucky(?) Numbers,
yesterday’s Pennsylvania lottery,
and the previous entry.